The central goal of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero is to address both of these problems.
Matches played over the Internet are often plagued by cheaters, and since the game has no single-player component to speak of, Counter-Strike is extremely intimidating for new players to get into. Yet even Counter-Strike's biggest fan would readily admit that the game has some serious problems. And the fact that you could download it for free made it incredibly popular. As you probably know, the original Counter-Strike began as a multiplayer mod for Half-Life but later became a phenomenon: Its intense action, original gameplay, and real-world context of antiterrorist warfare made it a fantastic game. At the recent Game Developers Conference we caught up with Randy Pitchford, president of Gearbox Software, the company that's now polishing up the forthcoming Counter-Strike: Condition Zero.
